Who are YOU to tell anyone what the so called proper role of government is? It must be hard walking around with that God complex you have on your shoulder.

For your information, this is what the Constitution says:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

And in approving this document, the states also RIPPED TO SHREDS the Liberutopia "Articles of Confederation."

I take it you didn't graduate Summa Cum Laude did you? The total defence department budget represents 19% of the spending, about 700 billion. Our current debt spending is 1.3 trillion, so we could delete the entire defence budget and still be running a 600 billion/yr deficit. How is that going to reduce your taxes? If we are spending all of this money on the defence department with the goal of keeping oil prices down, then why are we paying almost $4/gal right now for gas, not working very well is it? If you are so worried about what you pay in taxes, I hope you don't vote to be a slave.

"Defense" is actually a proper role of governement. That said - even it could be trimmed.

Welfare checks which encourage indolence, big union bail-outs, loans to solyndra, free healthcare, subsidies to ethanol etc etc are all not proper roles of governement. You complain about the defense budget, but how about the so-called entitlement budget. Maybe I wouldn't need to drive 50 miles each way to work if I didn't have to pay for all those government hand-outs.

I say let's compromise and cut both in terms of real (not projected spending) dollars.

@analyst. You danced and dodged around the topic very well but you didn't provide any type of relevent rebuttal. The topic was not about the EPA and water nor the military spending but about government control of the automobile industry and how it ultimately affects the consumer population. Try to stick to the topic.

Improving any/some/all of those will improve MPG. NONE of those necessaarily have to be at the expense of safety, given good engineering. The obvious qualifier in al of this is of course...cost. The biggest offsetter of manufacturing costs is....volume. So if these improved MPG vehicles could become a much greater volume mix for manufacturers, the economics of scale will tend to reduce their prices.

Recycling water requires very little energy. Gravity does most of the work. While electric pumps are used to push fresh water into the water system, the electricity could come from a clean source.

Recycling metals will continue until we no longer need metals. Cars really don't have much copper in them anymore.

Ethanol is made from sugar. Biodiesel is made from vegetable oil. Production of ethanol and biodiesel have very little impact on the food we eat. The US government pays farmers to produce less grain. This keeps grain prices artificially high and helps the corporate farms turn profit. We have production capacity to spare. Most fertilizers are processed from natural sources. Again, the electricity used could come from a clean source. I grew up on a grain farm. Vast quantities of fertilizer are not required. "On the average, approximately 1.2 pounds of nitrogen, 0.5 pounds of phosphate (P2O5) and 1.2 pounds of potash (K2O) are used to produce a bushel of corn. A large proportion of this is normally supplied by the organic matter and mineral portion of the soil."

As long as *I* am paying for the bloated defense department all so that *YOU* can enjoy a stabilized price when filling up your stupid truck, then I guess that *I* have a rational interest in energy efficiency standards for the nation.

We could all just ride scooters or walk too. You want to get drive that and get 69 mpg, that is great, and I need a truck that I can haul stuff in and pull a trailer with. I'm OK with getting 15 mpg. The government is made of nothing but people, like you and me, a neighbor maybe, and my experience it is not those that graduated Summa Cum Laude. Somehow we should expect any of these decisions to be good because they come under the guise of the government?, makes no sense to me. Seems more like self imposed slavery. I want to choose what kind of car I drive, not have my neighbor tell me what I should be driving.

Government control is responsible for the clean water you drink, and sanitary waste system that allows you to flush your toilet. Government controls are saving hundreds of thousands of lives on the highway and have made airplane crashes a rarity.

But all government activity has a price. Take the cost of the four times as big as it needs to be Defense department, whose primary purpose is to guarantee the stability of the price of oil that allows you to drive your car.

Focus on Fundamentals consists of 45-minute on-line classes that cover a host of technologies. You learn without leaving the comfort of your desk. All classes are taught by subject-matter experts and all are archived. So if you can't attend live, attend at your convenience.